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The Washington Roundtable is joined by the journalist and historian Garrett Graff to trace how post-9/11 immigration policy, which led to a surge in Border Patrol hiring, set the stage for today’s crisis in Minneapolis. The panel examines how ICE and C.B.P., created to protect Americans from outside threats, have been unleashed in America’s cities as what Graff calls “a fascist secret police.” “The Border Patrol has never been intended to be a force that is routinely interacting with American citizens,” Graff says. “Full stop, period, let alone routinely patrolling American cities.”

This week’s reading:

“Operation Trump Rehab,” by Susan B. Glasser

“The Green Monster,” by Garrett Graff, for Politico, 2014

“Why Minnesota Can’t Do More to Stop ICE,” by Garrett Graff, for Wired

“The Schoolchildren of Minneapolis,” by Emily Witt

“What ICE Should Have Learned from the Fugitive Slave Act,” by Jelani Cobb

“Do Federal Officials Really Have ‘Absolute Immunity’?,” by Isaac Chotiner

“Witnessing Another Public Killing in Minneapolis,” by Vinson Cunningham

“The Cruel Conditions of ICE’s Mojave Desert Detention Center,” by Oren Peleg

“Maybe the United States Can Be One of Mark Carney’s ‘Middle Powers,’ ” by Bill McKibben

“Trump’s Greenland Fiasco,” by Joshua Yaffa

“What MAGA Can Teach Democrats About Organizing—and Infighting,” by Charles Duhigg

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

The first documented arrival of Haitian refugees in South Florida dates to 1972, when a wooden sailboat, the Saint Sauveur, ran aground off of Pompano Beach, carrying sixty‑five asylum seekers fleeing the ruthless dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier. Many Haitian families gravitated to Lemon City, one of the oldest settlements in Miami, developed in the late eighteen-hundreds and, at the time, largely populated by lemon-grove workers from the Bahamas. As more Haitians arrived in the area in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, they opened businesses, churches, markets, and cultural centers. Viter Juste, a businessman and activist who’s often called the father of Miami’s Haitian community, coined the name of the neighborhood in the early nineteen-eighties, and it stuck.

Today in Little Haiti, a seven‑foot bronze statue of Toussaint Louverture, one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution, stands in a small plaza known as the City of Miami Freedom Garden. The plaza sits across from a gas station and bakery, surrounded by rows of modest homes, some purchased decades ago by newly arrived Haitian immigrants, before gentrification began to reshape the neighborhood. Since the statue’s installation, in 2005, three years after I moved to Miami, and a little more than a year after the bicentennial of Haitian independence, the spot has become a neighborhood gathering place. On January 1st, Haitian Independence Day, people stop by to take photos while area churches and neighbors share bowls of soup joumou, “freedom soup,” eaten to commemorate that day. Some afternoons, elders sit on the green benches surrounding the statue to talk or look out at the neighborhood, as they might once have done from their front porches back in Haiti. Occasionally, a group of tourists passes by, led by a tour guide dressed in a traditional blue denim karabela shirt and a straw hat, pausing to look up at the Haitian and American flags perched on tall flagstaffs, before reading the English translation of Louverture’s most famous declaration, at the statue’s base: “By overthrowing me, you have cut down the trunk of the liberty tree of the Blacks in Saint Domingue. It will grow again from its roots for they are numerous and they run deep into the ground.”

On January 12th, at the foot of the statue, a group of elected officials and community members gathered to commemorate the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010, killing more than two hundred thousand people and displaced 1.5 million. The event has been held annually for the past fifteen years, but this year there was an extra layer of sombreness to the proceedings, which the overcast skies seemed to reflect. On February 3rd, the Trump Administration is set to terminate Temporary Protected Status (T.P.S.) for Haitians in the United States, placing some three hundred and thirty thousand men, women, and children at risk of deportation. T.P.S., granted to certain immigrant populations when the conditions in their home country make safe return impossible, does not provide a path to citizenship, but gives recipients the crucial ability to work legally in the U.S. and, in many states, to obtain a driver’s license. After the 2010 earthquake, Haitian community leaders successfully appealed to the Obama Administration for T.P.S., and it has been extended ever since. Under Donald Trump, though, several countries with T.P.S. status, including Venezuela and Somalia, have recently had their designations terminated, and Haiti’s status is in limbo, as a pivotal lawsuit before the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., challenges the Trump Administration’s decision to revoke it. During hearings in early January, the presiding judge, Ana C. Reyes, questioned the government’s assertion that it would be safe to return to Haiti, pointing to the fact that the F.A.A. has restricted civilian flights over the capital of Port-au-Prince, and the State Department has warned against travel to Haiti. Reyes’s ruling is expected on February 2nd, one day before the T.P.S. designation for Haitians is set to expire.

According to the U.N., Haiti is facing one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. Since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, in 2021, armed groups have assumed control of large portions of the capital and surrounding areas, terrorizing civilians and causing 1.4 million people, including seven hundred and forty-one thousand children, to be displaced. Friends and family members of mine have moved from neighborhood to neighborhood to escape the violence. Some have had to abandon their homes, with all of their belongings still inside, only to find out later that those houses were burned to the ground. Displaced families often spend weeks, sometimes months, in makeshift dwellings, including public squares and deserted government buildings, while children lose months or even years of education as schools close or become inaccessible owing to gang activity. Sexual violence against women and girls has been on the rise as a tool of control by gangs. Five million and seven hundred thousand Haitians, close to half the population, are now facing high levels of food insecurity. Since Moïse’s assassination, Haiti has had no elected officials. The country’s interim governing body, the Transitional Presidential Council, has been mired in infighting and corruption allegations, and though its mandate ends on February 7th it has yet to reach consensus on who will lead the country or what form the next government will take.

One of the speakers at the earthquake vigil was Marleine Bastien, a Miami-Dade County commissioner and the founder of the nonprofit Family Action Network Movement, which organized the event. A sixty-six-year-old longtime activist, dressed in black, she clutched the microphone with both hands as she described the dire state of Haiti today. “This is a country at war,” she said. Bastien often reminds audiences that her own story is shaped by immigration. She grew up in a small town in the north of Haiti, in a family that practiced the Bahá’í faith, and as a teen-ager she spent her summers volunteering at a hospital near her home town, caring for malnourished babies. In 1981, her father, who had migrated to South Florida years earlier, encouraged her to seek political asylum in the U.S. after she denounced the dictatorship in a radio interview. When she arrived in Miami, at the age of twenty-two, she enrolled at Miami‑Dade Community College, then earned a master’s degree in social work at Florida International University. For more than a decade, she served as a medical social worker, supporting children with sickle-cell anemia, cancer, H.I.V., and AIDS, and she was one of many members of Miami’s Haitian community who were instrumental in securing T.P.S. after the earthquake. Now, lobbying Congress and speaking out in the media, she warns of the consequences of revoking T.P.S. status for Haitians. To deport them, she said, would be to “send them to a place where some will lose their lives.”

At 4:53 P.M., the same moment the earth in Haiti began to shake for an interminable thirty-five seconds in 2010, people bowed their heads to observe a moment of silence. Afterward, we marched to the nearby Caribbean Marketplace, a bright open hall designed by Charles Harrison Pawley, an architect born in Haiti to American parents, to resemble the famed Victorian-style Iron Market, in Port-au-Prince. During the procession, the sky opened and it started to rain, lightly at first, then in steady sheets. In years past, the vigil has attracted a crowd that fills the whole street. This year, attendance was the lowest I had seen. The rain didn’t help, but neither did Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown, which has left many in the community in a constant state of anxiety. Just a few days earlier, as part of a large-scale ICE operation in Minneapolis, an agent had fatally shot Renee Good, a thirty‑seven‑year‑old American citizen, in her car. As Bastien told me later, “People are, of course, afraid that what’s happening in Minneapolis can easily happen here.”

In the past, members of the Haitian community have felt betrayed by American politicians on both sides of the aisle. A decade ago, during Trump’s first Presidential campaign, he held a town-hall-style meeting with Haitian American allies during which he said, “I will be your champion.” Many of the MAGA-friendly Haitians who hosted Trump were angry about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s long history of fraught involvement in Haiti, including the former President’s role in failed post-earthquake recovery efforts, and the former Secretary of State’s support for the controversial musician turned politician Michel Martelly. In October of 2020, Joe Biden took his turn visiting Little Haiti during his bid to unseat Trump, promising that, if elected, he would make sure that the Haitian community had “an even shot.” As President, Biden extended Temporary Protected Status for Haiti throughout his term, in response to worsening conditions in the country, including an earthquake in the southern peninsula, in August 2021. In early 2023, the Administration introduced a humanitarian-parole program intended to reduce the number of people attempting dangerous migration routes to the United States. The C.H.N.V., or “pwogram Biden,” as it’s known among Haitians, allowed up to thirty thousand people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to enter the United States each month and remain for two years, provided that they passed security checks and had a U.S.‑based financial sponsor. The program ended in March, 2025, and under the Trump White House’s current policy all five hundred thousand beneficiaries could be subject to deportation unless they have secured another form of legal protection, such as asylum or T.P.S., both of which have become increasingly beyond reach.

In the Marketplace, we sipped ginger tea and ate Haitian patties and warm bouyon, a hearty stew provided by the vigil organizers, as Tessa Petit, the executive director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, addressed the crowd. Born and raised in Haiti, Petit lost her mother in the 2010 earthquake. She spoke of the Haitian American community’s ongoing grief, now compounded by fear of deportations, but she also stressed the wider economic consequences of ending T.P.S. “We deserve to be recognized for what we have contributed and continue to contribute to this nation,” she said, adding that a hundred and thirteen thousand Haitian T.P.S. holders are members of Florida’s labor force, contributing an estimated $1.3 billion in state and local taxes. Elsewhere in the country, she said, Haitians “have revived towns that were dying.” She was referring to places such as Springfield, Ohio, where Haitian immigrants have helped reverse decades of population loss and fill essential jobs in manufacturing and food processing, even as Donald Trump and Vice-President J. D. Vance spread the lie that they were “eating the dogs.” Many advocates I spoke with hope that evidence of Haitians’ contributions might appeal to the Trump Administration where pleas for compassion have failed. A recent letter to Trump from the San Diego-based immigration-rights organization Haitian Bridge Alliance and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. argues that Haitian T.P.S. holders contribute 5.9 million dollars to the U.S. economy and that it is “counter-productive” to decimate a “legal, tax-paying workforce that is already filling critical gaps in the U.S. labor market.”

Many T.P.S. recipients are reluctant to speak publicly for fear of attracting ICE’s attention, but at the vigil a few chose to share their stories. One of them was Corinne, a stylish twenty-five-year-old with a cloud of voluminous curls. She was nine when she arrived in the U.S. with her mother and her one-year-old sister, after the 2010 earthquake. They entered on visas and soon became beneficiaries of T.P.S. After graduating from high school, she enrolled at a local private university, paying out of pocket because, as a T.P.S. holder, she was ineligible for financial aid. During her first year of college, her mother fell ill with a chronic pulmonary illness and could no longer work, so Corinne took a job in a retail store to support her family. She dreamed of pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology, and she earned a 4.0 G.P.A., but she eventually had to withdraw from school. In her retail job, she began as a seasonal worker in the shipping department but was eventually promoted to business manager. She now oversees a hundred and twenty employees, and she remains the sole provider for her mother and her sister, who is now seventeen and applying to college. Corinne fears being sent back to Haiti, a country she has not seen since she was nine. “But I also keep thinking about my sister,” she told me later. “What’s going to happen to her and her future if she has to go back with us?” At the vigil, she said, “We are not a status. We are human beings.”

Alongside the federal immigration crackdown, Florida has launched its own state-run immigration-enforcement program, Operation Tidal Wave, with some of the most punitive measures in the country. In recent legislative sessions, state lawmakers have introduced bills that would bar undocumented immigrants from opening bank accounts and restrict the money-transfer services that many immigrants use to send remittances back to their home countries. These proposed measures come on top of existing laws that restrict driver’s licenses and expand local law enforcement’s authority to turn people over to ICE. Since late 2025, under new agreements with the Department of Homeland Security, Florida has deputized more than eighteen hundred state troopers to perform federal-immigration functions. The state has also expanded its detention infrastructure, opening a “deportation depot” in Baker County, and the Everglades complex known as Alligator Alcatraz, where advocates report that detainees are held in extreme heat in overcrowded and unsanitary dorms with inadequate medical care and little or no access to legal representation.

The day after the vigil, at the Sant La Haitian Neighborhood Center, in North Miami, I met a couple in their forties who arrived in the U.S. in 2022, with their four children, now five, fourteen, nineteen, and twenty. They had walked to the U.S. border after travelling from Brazil through Colombia and crossing the perilous Darién Gap. Three years ago, their youngest child, a boy, was born in Miami with Down syndrome and gastroschisis, a rare condition in which a baby’s intestines, and sometimes other organs, develop outside the body, requiring specialized medical care. They worry that he would not survive if they were forced to return with him to Haiti, and like many “mixed‑status” families they’ve grappled with the wrenching dilemma of whether their child would be better off remaining in the U.S. without them. But they have decided that they could never leave the boy behind.

Attorneys at the Haitian Lawyers Association, a Miami-based nonprofit, have created a dedicated task force to help those at risk of deportation. They have organized free law clinics and offered pro-bono counsel, while also helping clients prepare for possible deportation by organizing powers of attorney, wills, trusts, and guardianship documents for their children and elderly parents. The attorneys consult with counterparts in Haiti, as well as in Canada, where many Haitians have fled, sometimes by walking long distances in freezing temperatures and crossing the northern border on foot.

Vance recently said that ICE agents could begin going door to door in the coming months, exacerbating fears. The husband I met at Sant La told me, “We jump every time there’s a knock.” Josette Josué, the center’s director of community health, told me, “Some of the people we serve are so afraid, they don’t even answer phone calls. They won’t open the door if you visit. They’re afraid to go to church or the supermarket. They barricade themselves inside.” One fifteen-year-old girl, whose family fled Haiti after being caught in the middle of a battle between two gangs, told her mother, who then told Josué that she would rather die than return. Florida school districts have seen dwindling enrollment since 2024, owing, in part, to immigrants leaving the state or fearing being detained by ICE.

Bastien, the H.L.A. lawyers, and others told me that, even if the federal court in D.C. issues an injunction blocking the termination of T.P.S., and even if the program is extended, the community will experience only a temporary sense of relief. The Trump Administration is likely to appeal the decision, reviving the threat of deportation. The only durable solution is a pathway to permanent residency for those who have spent years working, raising families, and paying taxes in the United States. Guibert St. Fort, the program coördinator at Sant La, told me that the people who walk into the center every day somehow hold out hope. “Their faith has been tested again and again,” St. Fort said. “They feel that, if God wanted me to die, he would have let me die where I came from or somewhere along the way.” The couple I met proudly showed me photos of their children—sitting beside a Christmas tree in matching holiday‑themed pajamas, wearing their school uniforms. Their two eldest daughters would like to go to college; one wants to become a nurse. “We have gone through so much,” the wife said. “Like all parents, we hope our children accomplish all that we’ve sacrificed for. We hope their dreams will come true.” ♦

In October, Senate Democrats plunged the country into a shutdown. As I wrote at the time, the Party’s leaders primarily needed their base to see them pushing back on Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, especially after ducking out of a funding fight earlier in the year, though, in the end, they oriented their crusade around the extension of expiring health-care subsidies, a relatively conventional policy dispute. After forty-three days—the longest government closure in U.S. history—eight members of the Senate Democratic caucus switched their votes, breaking the filibuster and allowing the government to reopen. The base howled with fury: Democrats had been winning in the court of public opinion; Trump himself said that the shutdown was a “big factor” in the Democrats’ rout of the G.O.P. in off-year elections the prior week. But I suggested that the Party had already succeeded, both in putting up a fight and in forcing a critical issue up the agenda, and that carrying on would harm, for example, recipients of government-provided food benefits, without making Republicans likelier to cave on the subsidies. Plus, under the terms of the vote, most of the government was funded only through the end of January, when Democrats would again have leverage.

Some of what happened next vindicated my stance. A Senate vote on extending the subsidies, promised in exchange for ending the shutdown, came, predictably, to nothing, and those subsidies expired at the end of the year. But health care remained a live issue, not to mention a political liability for the G.O.P. A shutdown redux looked possible, too, over health care or something else. (Inevitably, the Epstein files were mentioned.) In the following weeks, though, the odds grew more remote, as key Senate Democrats signalled a lack of appetite to go back to the mat, and their colleagues in the House worked with Republicans to process the bills necessary to fund the government on a longer-term basis. All but one of these eventually cleared the chamber with strong bipartisan support. A bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security—negotiated against the backdrop of the Trump Administration’s brutal crackdown in Minneapolis and the killing, on January 7th, of Renee Nicole Good—was widely opposed by House Democrats, many of whom viewed safeguards written into it, for example, around training and body cameras, as insufficient. Even then, though, leadership didn’t whip against the bill, which ultimately passed with seven Democrats voting in favor. As of last week, the Senate was on track to pass that funding bill and others, as a package, by the January 30th deadline, assuming that a winter storm didn’t derail its schedule. The likeliest cause of a shutdown appeared to be ice, not ICE.

Then, last weekend, federal agents in Minneapolis killed Alex Pretti, the Administration rushed to smear him as a terrorist, and Senate Democrats changed their tune, uniting, suddenly, in insisting that Republicans separate D.H.S. from the wider package, pending the insertion of tougher guardrails. This ask was complicated—splitting the package would require sending it back to the House, which was out of session; tanking the whole thing would theoretically cripple swaths of the federal government, from the T.S.A. to the I.R.S.—and yet, unlike in the fall, when Republicans simply refused to budge in the run-up to a shutdown, this time they showed a willingness to negotiate. On Thursday, a deal, endorsed by the White House, was reportedly reached: Democrats would vote to fund most of the government through September, as planned; D.H.S. would remain funded for two weeks to allow Congress to haggle over Democrats’ demands that immigration agents wear body cameras, take off their masks, and end random sweeps, among other reforms. “The only thing that can slow our Country down is another long and damaging Government Shutdown,” Trump wrote, on Truth Social. “Hopefully, both Republicans and Democrats will give a very much needed Bipartisan ‘YES’ Vote.”

A shutdown, though perhaps not a “long and damaging” one, still appeared likely: later on Thursday, Speaker Mike Johnson said—from the not-red red carpet of the (almost unbelievably) high-budget Amazon documentary about Melania Trump—that the House cannot come back before Monday to O.K. any Senate deal, a delay that would close parts of the government through the weekend at least. Meanwhile, an effort to quickly push the compromise through the Senate failed, principally, it emerged because Lindsey Graham was mad that the deal would block some senators, himself included, from receiving monetary damages for the Biden-era Justice Department having subpoenaed their phone records, as part of the January 6th investigation. On Friday, Graham suggested that he would cede, for now. As of this writing, the deal was on track to pass—maybe even in time for the senators to leave for dinner.

Already, though, the mere prospect of Democrats engaging in a deal with the Administration over ICE has excited liberal outrage: scrolling through X earlier, I saw plenty of posts accusing Democrats of caving again, one of which described Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, as a “fascist collaborator”; responding to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s insistence that a ban on deporting U.S. citizens must be part of any final D.H.S. funding agreement, Graham Platner, the populist Senate candidate in Maine, asked, “Why are we negotiating over things that are ALREADY illegal and banned by the Constitution?” Platner added, “I knew Democratic leaders were stupid and ineffectual. I had no idea they were THIS stupid and ineffectual.” I’ve shared similar sentiments before, albeit less bluntly. But I’m not sure that the latest evidence points cleanly toward the same conclusion—at least, not yet.

In some ways, the calculus that Senate Democrats faced this week wasn’t so different from that which led them to shut down the government in October. The importance of being seen, by their base, as fighting back against Trump has, if anything, only intensified as the Administration’s behavior has grown more nakedly outrageous. Last time, Democrats focussed on health care, which is an unambiguously good issue for the Party; immigration was until recently seen as something like the opposite, but the revolting, ostentatious callousness of Trump’s deportation operations—even before Border Patrol agents killed Pretti—seems to have changed that. (According to the data journalist G. Elliott Morris, Trump’s average approval rating on immigration dipped durably underwater last summer and has continued to trend down; one poll, conducted in the hours after Pretti’s death, found that forty-six per cent of Americans support abolishing ICE entirely.) In another sense, the context this time was different. A leading argument for the October shutdown was that it would give Democrats the chance to concentrate public attention on otherwise diffuse Trumpian crises. In recent days, public attention has seemed to consolidate itself; if anything, Senate Democrats have been the ones reacting to it.

This reality may have given Democrats an even stronger hand this go-around; indeed, Republicans seemed to recognize as much and moved to do a deal broadly on the Democrats’ terms. In the gamified language of the Beltway press, Democrats appeared to use the minority’s chief source of institutional leverage—the Senate filibuster—to score a policy “win,” a rare outcome in shutdown fights. Yet it’s not clear that Democrats have won just yet. With people dying at the hands of federal agents and Trump’s immigration abuses already front and center, they need to secure not only attention but concrete reforms; it remains unclear whether Republicans will be willing to sign off on Democrats’ proposals, and, if so, at what price. Already, some G.O.P. lawmakers, including Graham, are speaking of extracting concessions on “sanctuary city” policies. It’s also legitimate to argue that Democrats have frittered away some of their power here, especially with public opinion so firmly behind them. They could have taken the other unpassed funding bills hostage to get what they want. They could have refused to sanction any new funding for D.H.S., period, until they do.

It’s tempting to see shutdowns as a straightforward moral choice for Democrats: stand up to tyranny or pony up for it. In reality, though, they are imperfect instruments of accountability. Opting to cut off D.H.S. would not have stopped ICE, necessarily—the agency is flush with backup funding passed as part of Trump’s megabill last summer—and would likely have posed more difficulties for less controversial parts of D.H.S., such as FEMA and the Coast Guard. And Congress has other tools at its disposal. At the time of the October shutdown, its Republican majorities had mostly rolled over to let Trump tickle their bellies—when they did anything at all—but they have lately displayed spasms of critical thinking over Epstein, Venezuela, Greenland, the Fed, and, now, deportations. Indeed, the bipartisan passage of funding bills, a departure from recent practice, has itself been styled as a reclamation of congressional authority from Trump, especially given that, in doing so, lawmakers rejected the most swingeing cuts to the federal bureaucracy that his Administration proposed for the coming year. At the same time, the relative novelty of congressional Republicans’ public criticisms of the Administration should not be mistaken for strength—mostly, they’ve been woefully tepid, given the circumstances. Others have speculated that the Administration could simply ignore the expressed will of Congress, on the recent bipartisan spending agreements and any future guardrails placed on ICE. Democrats, in other words, may have done a deal to do a second deal that might not be good on its own terms, and, even if it is, might not be worth the paper it’s written on.

If the key problem with the Trump Administration and its immigration operations is their abnormal lawlessness, it may indeed be naïve to think that the normal legislative process will hem them in. It’s easy to overstate the extent to which the Administration has backpedalled following the widespread outrage about Pretti’s death, beyond changes in staffing and optics. But its response has not entirely been that of a government that views itself as immune from basic democratic accountability. And there is, at least, a rational argument to be made that the rejoinder to abnormality is the reassertion of normality; if Congress has rightly been criticized for rolling over to Trump, then it seems at least a little perverse to instinctively write off legislation that could place meaningful restrictions on his agents. Democrats will not succeed in abolishing ICE, even if they all wanted to. (And they do not; indeed, the tedious semantic hand-wringing about the idea has already begun in earnest.) But forcing agents to take off their masks and limiting whom they can target, and when, is not nothing. The point of leverage, at some point, is that you use it.

Two things can be true at once: Democrats have generally performed miserably in resisting Trump so far; also, their options for doing so are limited and involve genuinely difficult trade-offs. If they fail to secure significant concessions from this position of relative strength, the backlash will justifiably be fierce, and the case for refusing to coöperate in any way with this regime will only grow in appeal. Earlier this week, Chris Murphy, the increasingly outspoken liberal senator, told The New Republic, “If people don’t see us fighting on something as existential as whether we condone the federal government murdering our own citizens, then there will be a mass withdrawal from politics altogether.” In the cynical language of Washington, this is one way of saying that the base needs to see us fight back—the logic that was, perhaps, the main driver of the October shutdown. In a purer sense, it sounds like an acknowledgment of what, in hindsight, should have been obvious even back then: that Senate Democrats would eventually have to fight Trump’s abuses not by proxy but head on. ♦

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The staff writers Emily Witt and Ruby Cramer discuss the situation in Minneapolis, a city effectively under siege by militaristic federal agents. “This is a city where there’s a police force of about six hundred officers [compared] to three thousand federal agents,” Witt points out. Cramer shares her interview with Mayor Jacob Frey, who talks about how Minneapolis was just beginning to recover from the trauma of George Floyd’s murder and its aftermath, and with the police chief Brian O’Hara, who critiques the lack of discipline he sees from immigration-enforcement officers. Witt shares her interviews with two U.S. citizens who were detained after following an ICE vehicle; one describes an interrogation in which he was encouraged to identify protest organizers and undocumented people, in exchange for favors from immigration authorities.

Ruby Cramer’s “The Mayor of an Occupied City” was published on January 23rd. Emily Witt’s “The Battle for Minneapolis” was published on January 25th.

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

“Pillion,” a gay B.D.S.M.-themed romantic comedy, begins, fittingly, with a song of submission. As the camera speeds down a road at night, we hear the lovesick lyrics of the Italian singer Betty Curtis’s 1962 hit “Chariot.” You might recall the song from “Goodfellas” (1990), playing over the mobster Henry Hill’s haphazard courtship of his future wife, Karen. Or you might flash back to “Sister Act” (1992), in which a choir of nuns converted the song into a sacred anthem of praise (“I will follow him / Follow him wherever he may go”). It’s hard to say which of these associations is nearer the mark. Does “Pillion,” like “Goodfellas,” chart the rocky relationship between a cocksure ruffian and a wide-eyed naïf? Or does the film, like “Sister Act,” illuminate the private rituals of a niche subculture, whose devotees perform unquestioning acts of service while dutifully garbed in black?

The novitiate, in this case, is Colin Smith (Harry Melling), a genial young man from the southeast London suburb of Bromley. Colin works in parking enforcement, sings in a barbershop quartet, and lives at home with his endlessly supportive parents, Peggy (Lesley Sharp) and Pete (Douglas Hodge), who just want him to settle down with a nice boyfriend. But Colin doesn’t settle down; he rides off. Not into the sunset—Bromley doesn’t seem to get many—but clinging tightly to Ray, a tall, dreamy blond motorcyclist. Ray is played by Alexander Skarsgård, who has never looked more like a Nordic god than he does here: immaculately chiselled, and as disdainful of small talk as he is impervious to chilly weather. The two men first lock eyes in a pub on a winter’s night, where Colin is instantly smitten. What Ray sees in Colin is initially more mysterious. They meet again on Christmas, wandering from an empty town square into a side alley; a package is unzipped, and gifts are furtively exchanged. The director and screenwriter Harry Lighton, making his feature-film début, isn’t coy about any of it, though he’s sly enough to plant some foreshadowing in a nearby coffee-shop window: “Taste the Christmas Comforts.”

The plot is basically “Fifty Shades of Ray.” The hunky biker is a sexual dominant in search of a submissive, and this first encounter is a test of Colin’s prowess, stamina, and commitment to his master’s pleasure. An outdoor blow job is one thing—and no small thing, from the sound of Colin’s happy choking noises—but will he also, say, lick Ray’s boots on command and like it? (He will.) And how will he respond when, a few days later, Ray brings him to a sparsely furnished duplex, where Colin is expected to cook dinner and keep off the furniture—even to the point of sleeping on a rug, at the foot of Ray’s bed? Colin goes along with it, and the next day’s activities are his reward: a hot and heavy wrestling match, full of crotch-squeezing, ass-baring calisthenics, plus a consummation that produces more pain than pleasure. After the fun and games, Ray is all business once more. “Buy yourself a butt plug,” he says. “You’re too tight.” Colin replies, “Yeah! Yeah, yeah, um . . . lovely. That sounds like a plan.”

The beauty of Melling’s performance lies in the exquisite phrasing and timing of that “um . . . lovely,” which blends excitement, awkwardness, confusion, and curiosity in exquisitely calibrated proportions. Melling is something of a rarity among movie actors, a distinctive-looking chameleon. Those of us who first encountered him onscreen as Harry Potter’s oafish, spoiled cousin, Dudley Dursley, may not have even recognized him in his later, better roles, several of which—a sleuthing Edgar Allan Poe, in “The Pale Blue Eye” (2022); an evil pharmaceuticals C.E.O., in “The Old Guard” (2020)—played on his air of gnomish cunning, his gimlet-eyed stare. “Pillion” represents another sharp left turn for the actor. To point out that Colin isn’t a conventional romantic lead is also to note, redundantly, that this movie isn’t a conventional romance.

Is it a romance at all? The two parties would disagree. “That’s not what this is,” Ray declares, with some exasperation but also a flicker of tenderness, after Colin tells him, “I love you.” Their bond is founded on a narrow principle of sexual gratification and governed by a strict imbalance of power: firm directives from Ray, effusive accommodations from Colin. Before long, Colin has buzzed his hair and fallen in with Ray’s biker gang, many of whose members are paired off in sub-dom dyads of their own. The group dynamics carry richly suggestive undercurrents of jealousy and camaraderie, though Lighton, for all the quasi-anthropological curiosity and matter-of-fact sexual candor of his vision, doesn’t flesh this out in great depth. (There is, however, a funny-melancholy scene in which Colin compares notes with another submissive, played by Jake Shears.) Lighton uses these dynamics, instead, to sow a seed of individual rebellion. Sooner or later, we sense, Colin will consider the terms of his agreement with Ray and decide that, after months of unerring obedience, some personal transgression of his own is in order.

No such revolt occurs in Adam Mars-Jones’s novel “Box Hill,” from which “Pillion” was adapted. The book, which bears the subtitle “A Story of Low Self-Esteem” and is set during the nineteen-seventies, is a sliver of a tale—slender yet devastatingly sharp. When we first meet Mars-Jones’s Colin, he’s a sexually inexperienced eighteen-year-old, who stumbles across Ray on Box Hill, a gay cruising ground. Their relationship lasts several years, only to be ended by tragedy, though some would see the end as a mercy: the Ray we meet on the page is not just demanding and inconsiderate but abusive. “What had begun as a rough seduction ended as, well, rape,” the book’s Colin tells us after Ray penetrates him for the first time, sans preamble or lubricant. “I’d said he could do anything with me. I know that. But some things can’t be consented to.”

“Pillion” never directly broaches the question of consent—but, crucially, nothing that Colin experiences, whether physical discomfort or emotional neglect, can be construed as a violation. What the director has done, in effect, is Lighton the mood. He has updated the setting to a present-day moment that is less closeted and more kink-friendly, if dominant-submissive romances as different as “Babygirl” (2024) and “Fifty Shades of Grey” (2015) are any indication. (“Pillion” has also aged Colin well past his teen-age years; although the character’s age is never specified, Melling is thirty-six.) Much of the onscreen conflict involves Colin’s parents, who, unlike their literary counterparts, know that their son is gay and take an embarrassingly overactive role in nurturing his love life. But Lighton doesn’t treat them as sitcom-ish meddlers. Peggy, wonderfully played by Sharp, is terminally ill, and she’s fiercely determined to insure that Colin is well taken care of after she’s gone. That puts her at odds with Ray, whose investment in her son hinges on a brusque, performative disregard for Colin’s happiness.

Ray can be cruelly withholding. He reveals nothing about where he’s from or what he does for a living, and he reserves what affection he has for his dog and his motorcycle. But he isn’t abusive, and there’s little suggestion of menace or danger in Skarsgård’s performance. The actor has already shown us what that would look like: in the series “Big Little Lies,” he played a husband and father whose taste for kink masked a terrifying hunger for inflicting pain. Ray, by contrast, is a figure of intermittent but undeniable mirth—a citadel of physical perfection whose sublimity occasionally touches the ridiculous. It’s both amusing and clarifying to see him in moments of downtime, when he sits around the apartment wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and elegant little specs. Playing a slow, faltering rendition of “Gymnopédie No. 1” on a keyboard or burying his nose in a Karl Ove Knausgaard novel, he’s practically a caricature of latent male sophistication and sensitivity, momentarily freed from all that sweat and leather.

Skarsgård wrings so much effortless dom-com gold from Ray’s show of intransigence that it’s almost a shock to see the performance deepen; he makes the character’s emotional limitations remarkably expressive. It should perhaps come as no surprise to learn that Ray’s extreme need for control is rooted in insecurity, and that nothing threatens him more than the reality of his own feelings—the possibility that he might actually want more from Colin than just a physical release. “Pillion” does turn out to be a romance after all, or at least more of one than Ray can admit or allow. The movie’s ending deviates, significantly and generously, from Mars-Jones’s much bleaker conclusion: Colin’s heart may be broken, but something within him has undeniably strengthened. He hasn’t lost what Ray calls his “aptitude for devotion,” or his genius for submission. But, in all the ways that count, he is riding pillion no longer. ♦